Console wars
The largest players on the video gaming market include companies such as Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft, to name just a few. At the top of the list of public companies by gaming revenue in 2019 was Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which generated revenue of over 5.2 billion U.S. dollars through video gaming in the fourth quarter of 2019. When it comes to video game consoles, a three-way battle is currently being fought out between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Since its release in 2013, Sony's PlayStation 4 has achieved cumulative worldwide sales of over 112 million units, while lifetime unit sales of Microsoft's Xbox One, released in the same year as Sony's console, are hovering around 50 million. Despite being late to the party and only being released in March 2017, Nintendo's latest offering, the Nintendo Switch, has been a roaring success across the globe, with worldwide unit sales of the console exceeding 63 million.Who are the gamers?
Gaming is a hobby enjoyed by people of all ages and background and is often a time-consuming one. During a 2020 survey assessing the average weekly time spent playing video games worldwide, almost 15 percent of respondents claimed to spend seven to 12 hours a week playing video games, while 7.4 percent confessed to devoting more than 20 hours a week to the hobby. Men are still the slightly more dominant gender among gamers, and while there was a time when the proportion of female gamers had seen an increase, it seems that men are reclaiming their majority as gamers. Moreover, video gaming can be an expensive hobby, with enthusiasts handing over their hard-earned cash to get the latest game releases or the newest generation consoles. In 2019, consumer spending on video game content in the United Sates hit 35.4 billion U.S. dollars, more than double the amount from 2011.Statista’s exclusive Global Consumer Survey holds further information on the video gaming behavior of adult internet users in the United States. The comprehensive catalog of consumer research provides detailed figures on device preferences, gamer spending habits, commonly used streaming platforms as well as gaming intensity and weekly hours devoted to the activity. For more in-depth insights each data point is broken down by various target groups to better portray specific gaming habits. All this and much more can be explored in the Global Consumer Survey.
